Page 24 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

I-Ienri Frankfort died on 15 July 1954• His sudden ill-
ness and his death made it impossible for him to see this volume
through the press. However, so exacting had been his scholar­

ship and so intense his enthusiasm that no alterations of any im­
portance can have been necessary. What had to be done was
!
done as an act of friendship by Miss Rachel Levy, to whom I
wish to express my gratitude.
I 1
Professor Frankfort, whom I first met when he was still at
the Oriental Institute in Chicago, had been working on this book
from 1947 to 1953. Co-operation on its later phases was sim­

pler, as he was then Director of the Warburg Institute of the
University of London. The fact that he, an orientalist, had been
chosen as head of this Institute, which is devoted to post-graduate

research in the history of art, shows at once what was most ex­
ceptional in his attitude to his subject. He did not approach it

as an antiquarian, although fully equipped to do so and although
his experience ranged from field work to philosophy. His great­
est love was the work of art for its own sake, and he regarded it
as his task-as indeed the present book fully proves-to present

oriental art as art, and not as archaeological evidence. It is not
for me here to express my warm feeling and my admiration for
him. May this volume of the Pelican History of Art be accepted

as a monument to him as a man and a scholar.

THE EDITOR